Partly motivated by having an older brother retarded from birth trauma , I
spent from about 1965 til 1980 trying to figure out how brains work .
By the time I entered graduate school at Northwestern University in 1969 , I
realized that nothing but mathematical explanations satisfied me . I learned
APL simultaniously with learning multidimensional algebra and geometry . The
powers APL gave me also tended to isolate me because none of my peers or
professors understood it .

A major motivation for my - some have said : monomaniacal -
determination to create and live my life in a general purpose APL
environment is a sense that only a population understanding APL level
notation will be able to play with and grok my old work , and move forward .

I still consider the work I did back then the most consequential I will
ever do , altho it is only now with the Web , that I can publish it widely
myself . The final status of my thoughts is summarized in ScienceNews:ConsciousnessLtr921031

By 1979 , I had been effectively ostracized from the experimental psychology
department and any chance of getting a PhD . However Professor Donald T Campbell
, a social psychologist and philosopher supported the typing up and printing
of about 50 copies of what would have been my thesis .
Views/sykofiz/Thresholds Otherwise , my only resource was unlimited access to Vogelback
Computing center . I certainly had no money to hire a typist . Perhaps an
additional spur towards using the computer for everything is my poor
handwriting -- I`m left handed .

For the APL conference in Rochester NY that year , I wrote the following
paper as a poster summarizing the crucial experimental evidence that my
insights into threshold behavior were correct .
All of the editing was done in APL and some of the functions from back then
remain in constant use in CoSy today [ 2000 ].